Buddy Boys

by Mike McAlary

  In the beginning, Henry even cried. Things bothered him back then. Finding dead infants in garbage pails bothered him. It bothered him to see elderly people dead too. Dead kids and elderly people bothered him most of all. And in order to keep some semblance of sanity, Henry Winter set up little emotional guidelines for himself. Any victim falling between the ages of sixteen and sixty was fair game, he decided. He wouldn’t care about them. But he would allow himself to be bothered—and even cry—if he saw a victim of a crime younger than sixteen or older than sixty.

  A cop from the 77th had to set up some sort of immunity system against tragedy and trauma, Henry decided, if he didn’t want to wind up like Peter Heroin.

  It seemed to Henry that no one in the ghetto had any respect for life. On July 4, 1981, there was a wild shootout on St. Johns Place. Two men and a woman died, their bodies lying in the street. A crowd of citizens formed, ignoring the dead draped in white sheets, and gathered around a brand-new Mustang parked near the shooting scene. The car had a bullet hole in the right front fender.

  “Poor car,” one man said.

  “At first, I couldn’t get over how little life meant to people in the precinct. Especially the kids. I would say to one of them, ‘You killed that guy for ten dollars?’ He’d say, ‘Yeah but that was my ten dollars.’ I couldn’t understand that at first. But then I saw the way these people lived and I understood.

  “Ten dollars is a fortune in the ghetto. Take someone living in an abandoned apartment—they use the stove for heat, don’t have water. They’ve got to run downstairs and get water out of a fire hydrant, go back upstairs, warm the water, and put it in a tub to wash the kids. The bathroom doesn’t work. They use another abandoned apartment on the next floor as the bathroom. Just going on the floor. The windows have been broken for two or three years, they’re covered with cardboard. You walk into the place, it’s freezing, and you find a kid that killed someone for ten dollars. To this kid ten dollars is a lot of money. It’s like ten thousand dollars to us.

  “When someone comes up to us and puts a gun in our face, we say ‘Take the ten dollars.’ But in the ghetto, the kids won’t give up the money. And if they do give it up, even if they’re unarmed and the muggers who ripped them off have nine-millimeter guns with fifteen shots in each, the kids’ll give chase. They’ll go after the robbers unarmed. Somehow they’ll catch them for that lousy ten dollars. The kids don’t want to press charges. They got their money back. They’re happy.”

  Police Officer Henry Winter was determined to make a difference in the lives of the people he met. Steadily, he lost faith in the justice system. He got tired of seeing the drug dealer he had arrested on one corner one day, back on the streets waving to him from another corner the next day. Henry began to realize that a police officer could do more harm to a bad guy than any New York City court.

  One day in 1982, he spotted a drug dealer on a corner in his sector. Henry would chase the dealer off the corner only to find him back there later in the day still peddling marijuana. He dropped the man’s drugs down the sewer one time and arrested him another. These actions had the same effect on the dealer’s curbside business—none.

  So one day Henry grabbed the dealer off the street and led him back to the station house into the muster room and sat him down at a table.

  “Empty your pockets,” Henry said.

  The dealer was not carrying drugs. But he did throw a wad of crumpled one- and five-dollar bills on the table. Henry studied them for a while—the bankroll came to $170—and then came up with a terrific idea.

  “This would make a nice fire,” he said.

  Henry piled the bills into a small heap and lit a match to them. The dealer began to scream, drawing a small crowd of police officers into the room. As his fellow cops shrieked their approval, he burned all the money, reducing the cash to a pile of cinders. For added dramatic effect, Henry then blew the ashes into the drug dealer’s lap. The cops cheered, all of them failing to take action on what amounted to the robbery of a drug dealer by a uniformed police officer in their own station house.

  The dealer gritted his teeth. Henry sat back and laughed.

  “You can’t do this,” the dealer finally announced.

  “Fuck you,” Henry said. “You fucking prove it’s money. To me it’s burnt paper. Now get the hell out of this station house, asshole. And if I ever see you on the streets again, we’re going to come in here and have another little bonfire. We may roast marshmallows next time.”

  The dealer left the precinct without saying another word, never to be seen in Police Officer Henry Winter’s sector again.

  Flushed with success after this small, albeit temporary, victory over a Bedford-Stuyvesant drug dealer, Henry was soon taking the law into his hands regularly. He became judge, jury, and hangman—forcing frightened dealers to flush their drugs and money down precinct toilet bowls. He felt good about himself as a police officer. He was making the bad guys suffer.

  That same year Henry had some trouble with a seventeen-year-old mugger named Brown who made his living robbing elderly women of their handbags on Utica Avenue, keeping the money, and selling the pocketbooks on Eastern Parkway to passing motorists who stopped for traffic lights.

  Responding to a call of “burglary in progress,” Henry once caught Brown trying to jimmy the lock on a woman’s door with a screwdriver. Henry handcuffed Brown and knocked on the door. He asked the woman if she wanted to press charges.

  “No,” she replied. “Just get him out of here.”

  Henry was incensed at the woman’s lack of civic pride.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to press charges. Look at your door. He damaged your door.”

  “No, no. I don’t want to get involved.”

  The woman’s response was typical, a refrain heard by police officers throughout the ghetto. But Henry would have none of it. He’d take care of Brown himself.

  He told his partner Al Cimino that he wanted to “take a meal.” Then he dropped Cimino off at the station house, saying he would take the burglar home.

  Instead, Henry drove his prisoner to the far side of Brooklyn, all the way out to Canarsie, ordering him out of the car on an isolated pier.

  “Now give me your sneakers,” Henry said.

  “What?”

  “The sneakers. Your felony shoes, kid. Give me the sneakers.”

  The suspect handed over his sneakers and Henry departed, leaving Brown to walk back home barefoot. Henry laughed as he drove back to the precinct, throwing the sneakers out of the car. He was extremely satisfied with himself. He was making a difference.

  Three months later in December, Henry caught Brown on Nostrand Avenue trying to rob an old lady of her handbag. This time Henry didn’t even bother to ask the woman to do her civic duty. He simply loaded Brown into his car and told another officer, “Cover for me. If any jobs come over the radio for my sector, just pick them up and pretend to be me. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  In the back of the car, Brown said, “Ah, shit. I just bought these sneakers.”

  Once again Henry swung by the station house, dropping off his partner. Cimino, who was into physical fitness, liked nothing better than to be left back at the station where he was free to lift hundreds of pounds of dead weight in the gym.

  “No more games, kid,” Henry said, turning to his prisoner once his partner was out of earshot. “I’m going to tan your hide. Either that or you’re going to jail.”

  “Beat me,” Brown pleaded. “Give me a beating. But don’t take me to jail.”

  “Fuck this beating shit. Nothing is going to stop you from coming out here again.”

  So Henry drove out of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Past Canarsie. Out of Brooklyn. Past Queens. Out of New York City. Past Valley Stream and onto the Southern State Parkway.

  “Where am I going?” Brown demanded.

  “Shut up,” Henry said, his patrol car flying east through Long Island at 80 miles an hour at three o’clock in the mo
rning.

  “I’m getting out.”

  “Go ahead. You want to jump? Go ahead, jump. I don’t care.”

  Henry continued east, passing a state trooper’s barracks, then turned south toward Jones Beach. He drove straight to the beach and parked his car at Parking Field Nine, ordering Brown out of the car.

  “Remember the last time I made you walk back from Canarsie with no sneakers?”

  Brown was aghast. “Oh man, you aren’t going to make me walk all the way back home without sneakers?”

  “No. You are one hundred percent right. This time, take everything off.”

  The suspect undressed and Henry departed, checking his rearview mirror in time to see Brown emerge from the parking field in T-shirt, underpants, and a pair of black socks. Heading back to the precinct, about forty miles away from the parking field, Henry threw the man’s sneakers, pants, shirt, and jacket along the way.

  “Jesus,” Henry said much later that night after hooking up with his muscle-bound partner again. “This car is a gas hog. How did the needle get to E so fast?”

  Brown made it back to the precinct to file a complaint against a cop nicknamed “Blondie” the next day, but he later moved out of the neighborhood. An investigation into the Jones Beach affair was dropped. No one believed the kid’s story anyway. No cop was crazy enough to drive a two-bit mugger an hour out of town in the middle of the night just to teach him a lesson. Not even in the 77th Precinct.

  Steadily, Henry developed friendships with street people. He could talk their language. And if Henry couldn’t talk their language, he simply made one up.

  He was patrolling his sector one day when Whitey Gilbert, a detective working as a field training officer with a group of rookies, suddenly came on the air. Gilbert was a straight arrow cop who operated by the letter of the law whenever he was breaking in a crop of rookies. The same guy who said, “The fucker went that way,” when he was with other veterans, now told rookies, “The suspect alighted in this direction.”

  On this day, Gilbert was in a tough predicament. He had responded to a neighborhood dispute only to discover a group of blacks from Guinea arguing in their native tongue—French. No one in the group spoke any English except the cops, who spoke no French.

  “Seven-Seven, Charley,” Gilbert said, putting out a call for help over the radio. “Does any unit out there know French?”

  Tony Magno, a police officer who speaks a lot of Brooklyn and a little English, nudged Henry and grabbed the radio, smiling.

  “Oui,” Tony said.

  They decided during the ride to the scene of the dispute that Henry would handle any and all foreign languages. When he arrived, Henry waved Gilbert off and headed into the heart of the fray, the rookies standing back in absolute awe.

  “Polly vou you woo woo. Frar a shocka une dos trees, polly voo kess que say arrestee.”

  The people stopped arguing and looked at Winter, blinking, astounded by what they had just heard. The cop was talking absolute gibberish. They screamed back at him in rapid-fire French.

  Undaunted, Henry held up his hand, demanding to be heard.

  “Le grande la loo, woo woo, we papa.”

  Again the Africans stopped arguing. Taking his cue, Henry turned to the unsuspecting rookies and began his interpretation.

  “The time and place of occurrence,” he began, “was ten hundred hours at this address.” An obliging rookie took copious notes and Henry returned to the argument, interjecting even more gibberish and confusion into the proceedings.

  “This guy says this women stole his money,” Henry concluded, making up a story to go with his make-believe French. “She denies taking the money. They just agreed to settle it in court.”

  Gilbert filled out a complaint report, handing it to his interpreter, who then explained the meaning of the paperwork to the Africans.

  “Wee, wee, poly see, you woo woo, en courto,” he said.

  Henry shut the door and the cops left.

  “Thank you so much,” Gilbert told Winter and Magno. “I owe you a beer. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “Ah, it was nothing,” Henry said. “You just have to speak the language.”

  “Oui,” Tony added.

  By now, Henry was approaching legendary status as the 77th Precinct’s resident prankster. But there were contradictions too. Certainly he was not a cop to be fooled with. Sure, Henry had once used his flashlight to cold-cock a Jamaican woman holding a baby during a dispute when the woman called him a “blood clot,” but he also had a soft side—particularly when it came to kids. He routinely handed out twenty-dollar bills to kids hanging out at the precinct house for washing his truck. None of them were even tall enough to reach the hood of Henry’s truck. He could not find fault with ghetto kids, only their parents. It wasn’t a kid’s fault that he was growing up in a slum, Henry decided.

  In the week before Christmas in 1983 Henry was called to an apartment near the corner of Washington Avenue and Lincoln Place. A mother had left her seven-year-old daughter Toya alone with a teenaged boy, the child’s cousin. The cousin, fourteen, had raped the girl. Henry and his partner arrested the cousin and took Toya to the hospital, where they spent most of the night. The child wouldn’t talk to anyone but Henry.

  He called the district attorney’s office and a prosecutor arrived at the hospital with two anatomically correct dolls. Henry took his shield off and began playing with the dolls, gaining the child’s confidence. Finally Toya used the dolls to reenact the rape scene for him.

  Later that night Henry Winter, father of two small daughters, left the hospital and drove home to a fitful night’s sleep. Still haunted by what he had seen and heard, he went out to a store the next morning and bought Toya several presents, including a Cabbage Patch Kid doll. Betsy gave Henry two dresses that no longer fit his own girls. He then drove to the hospital, giving Toya the doll, dresses, a coloring book, and crayons. He returned to the hospital again the next day, dropping off more toys and a twenty dollar bill.

  “Now when you get better, you go out and buy yourself a real Christmas present. You buy whatever you want.”

  Then he got busy. It was Christmas time in the ghetto. Muggers were robbing shoppers. Teenagers were shooting each other over presents, killing each other over sheepskin coats and new sneakers. New Year’s Day was no better. Winos and junkies were stabbing each other over $2 bottles of cheer and bags of junk.

  It seemed to Henry that a man could know no deeper gloom in life than to be working in a ghetto during the holiday season. To raise his spirits, he loaded up his truck with presents—hand-me down clothes from his own wife and kids—and drove down to an area frequented by neighborhood hookers, Lincoln Terrace Park. Henry knew that a lot of the prostitutes would have kids. He stayed parked there for an hour, handing out clothes. The prostitutes were thankful, and even offered Henry free use of their own wares in exchange for his gifts.

  “No thanks. But Merry Christmas anyway.”

  Six months later, Henry spotted Toya playing outside her home. The child was wearing one of the dresses he had given her, but the gift was now dirty, tattered and torn. He talked to the girl briefly, long enough to hear Toya say that her mother had sold her Cabbage Patch doll after she got out of the hospital and spent Henry’s twenty dollars on drugs. Henry went to look for the mother, but never found her. That was a good thing, Henry decided, because if he had caught up with Toya’s mother, the precinct’s homicide list would probably have grown by one.

  In time Henry forgot about Toya and her mother, but a little piece of him died with the memory.

  One day Henry responded to a robbery in a brownstone on Virginia Place. An elderly couple had been beaten and robbed of their gold and antique jewelry by their grandson, a mildly retarded twenty-five-year-old man named Charlie Isaacson. The couple gave the police officer a picture of their grandson and Henry set out to find the robber.

  Henry spotted Charlie on a nearby street corner and placed him in his
car. But after questioning the man for five minutes Henry could see that the robber was a little slow. Charlie confessed that he had taken the jewelry (valued at close to eight thousand dollars) to a local pawn shop.

  “I got this much back,” Charlie said, handing over twenty-five dollars.

  Henry was furious—not with the retarded robber but with the pawnbroker. Accompanied by Charlie, he burst into the pawn shop a few minutes later.

  “Did you just take some jewelry from this guy?” he demanded.

  The pawnbroker answered, “No.”

  Henry kicked down a partition and found the jewelry on a table. The pawnbroker was frightened and handed over the jewelry, never even bothering to ask for his own twenty-five dollars back. Henry returned the jewelry to Charlie’s grandparents along with twenty-five dollars interest. Rather than take Charlie to jail, he accompanied him to Kings County Hospital, where he was admitted and treated for six months in the psychiatric ward.

  Over the years Henry and Charlie became great friends. Henry gave Charlie his home phone number, and even brought him home for dinner. He taught Charlie how to talk to girls, advising him not to tell them he had money right away. And whenever Charlie smoked marijuana, he called Henry’s house. “Mrs. Winter, could you please tell Mr. Winter that I’m high?”

  Charlie still stole from his grandparents from time to time, but whenever Henry heard the call on the radio “Virginia Place,” he would handle the job.

  “Okay Charlie, what did we get for the jewels this time?”

  Charlie became Henry’s project. Here was one person in the ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant that he could really help.

  During his stay in the 77th Precinct, Henry met thousands of people and made hundreds of friends. But to this day only one Bedford-Stuyvesant resident still calls him at home. He calls regularly and always asks the policeman’s wife the same thing.

  “Mrs. Winter, is Mr. Winter still in town? Is he allowed to talk yet? I saw what happened on the television, you know. Is my friend Mr. Winter all right? Can I do anything for him?”